It is known in the art of subsurface resource recovery to employ drills of varying sizes and capacities to loosen and extract the target resource. For example, subsurface potash seams may be recovered be sinking shafts to the layer of interest and employing drilling or rubblizing equipment to break down the target layer to enable extraction to surface. Drilling equipment can be and is used to both form the mining shafts and to remove the target resource.
Drills are commonly mounted on mobile equipment that can be used to position the drill adjacent the surface to be drilled or bored. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,915,549 to Riddell discloses a mobile drilling apparatus comprising a work platform that can be selectively raised and lowered along with a series of vertically-spaced drills. In a further example, U.S. Pat. No. 8,342,267 to Hinshaw et al. discloses a mining apparatus where both a work platform and a drill are supported on a vehicle-mounted boom.
It is known to use equipment such as a telehandler to elevate and position a walled work platform or man basket in a desired raised location to enable work, including in subsurface environments. However, it is the common view that mounting a drill assembly on such a man basket would require a very heavy basket design for stability purposes, given the significant twisting and pushing forces exerted on the drill assembly base during drill operation, and the telehandler models conventionally employed would require a lighter basket design for reasons of safety within the designed load chart.
What is needed, therefore, is a drill basket capable of mounting on a telehandler while addressing the need for stability during drill use.